Herm... has time travel been discovered?

[Zeus Bigalow]

So, if anyone was watching Conan last Friday, they had an MIT Professor on to help him figure out how to break the ring spinning record. That's not really the point of this post.

He said something that was very intriguing. Conan was asking him about what he does and he made a joke about time travel, and the guy said, "Yeah, well we've already figured that one out." And Conan kind of was taken aback and said, "Wait, you've figured out time travel?" and the guy said, "Yeah, one of my buddies over at MIT figured out time travel, however, he also figured out that if we were to time travel, the universe would explode."

Now, I had never heard anything about this, so I'm wondering what you guys know about this. I can't recall the professor's name, sorry, someone else might know though...

[Mr. DNA]

I read something the other day about some dude who has worked out that it might be theoretically possible to create a "wormhole", through which folk from the future could travel and come back and meet us. It would be impossible for us to travel into either the past or the future, however. He's been watching too much Star Trek and Quantum Leap if you ask me.

[canadaguy]

Even the way you've explained the situation makes it seem like the professor was just saying it in jest. I mean it was on Conan and all.....




I read something the other day about some dude who has worked out that it might be theoretically possible to create a "wormhole", through which folk from the future could travel and come back and meet us. It would be impossible for us to travel into either the past or the future, however. He's been watching too much Star Trek and Quantum Leap if you ask me.


I wouldn't say impossible, because depending on what you actually consider to be traveling into the future, you could theoretically use relativistic effects of very high velocity travel and pop out a huge chunk of time ahead.

[Zeus Bigalow]

Well Einstein (I think) basically said that if you travel faster than the speed of light you would be time traveling because you would be traveling faster than your own light, in essence, going back in time.

[marasamune]

...that's all well and good except that part where you approach infinite weight and get crushed into a singularity by your own body.

[canadaguy]

You don't need to travel at or beyond light speed to have an effect on time. As your velocity increases, the passage of time for you relative to whatever that velocity is being measured will occur slower. I am not sure if its true, but I have heard that astronauts on the ISS end up being a couple seconds behind relative to us on Earth after a year or so.




That all may or may not make sense.

[Creeper]

canadaguy is right. If you take a clock with you on a supersonic jet and cruise around for a while, you can notice the difference in the second hands when you get back.

[Migraine.]

Who cruises around in a supersonic jet?

And, High-Speed travel, like Supersonic jets and Rocket Blast Offs, stretchesz you a little in length, therefore the more you 'time travel', the taller you become.

[I]

To time travel you have to travel faster than light. But you don't actually travel backwards through time only forward. IT has something to do with Light being as fast as time it self and when you go faster then it it slow's you down but keeps everything going just as fast. So if your traveling faster than light for 1 year you'd only age one day. I don't know how to explain it its in one of my 1000's of discover magazines. I'll look through them and try to find it and post it.

[WTF d00ds?]

Why don't we just go and ask John Titor how it's all done?

[Duke Nukem]

Travelling back in time is a paradox.

Say, if you travelled back to September 11th 2001, and stopped the terrorist attack from happening - this day today, you wouldn't have travelled back in time to stop it, because according to the history, the attack would've been evaded and there would be no need to prevent it. Or if you travelled back and prevented yourself from being born, you would've never grown up and hence never get the opportunity to travel back and prevent aforementioned action.

Travelling forth is a bit more tricky, especially because we don't know how many dimensions exactly that time exist in. All we really have is a bunch of logical assumptions.

[canadaguy]

To time travel you have to travel faster than light. But you don't actually travel backwards through time only forward. IT has something to do with Light being as fast as time it self and when you go faster then it it slow's you down but keeps everything going just as fast. So if your traveling faster than light for 1 year you'd only age one day. I don't know how to explain it its in one of my 1000's of discover magazines. I'll look through them and try to find it and post it.


First off, you cannot travel faster than light. Second, as I have already said you don't need to go at the speed of light to have time slow down.


Travelling back in time is a paradox.

Say, if you travelled back to September 11th 2001, and stopped the terrorist attack from happening - this day today, you wouldn't have travelled back in time to stop it, because according to the history, the attack would've been evaded and there would be no need to prevent it. Or if you travelled back and prevented yourself from being born, you would've never grown up and hence never get the opportunity to travel back and prevent aforementioned action.

Travelling forth is a bit more tricky, especially because we don't know how many dimensions exactly that time exist in. All we really have is a bunch of logical assumptions.


There are vagaries in time travel, that we can't really assume anything. We don't really know enough about how time works to say what would happen if someone were to travel backwards in time.

[Duke Nukem]

First off, you cannot travel faster than light. Second, as I have already said you don't need to go at the speed of light to have time slow down.Perhaps transmitting radiosignals back and/or forth would be possible in the near 'future'.

[chronofreak]

And, High-Speed travel, like Supersonic jets and Rocket Blast Offs, stretchesz you a little in length, therefore the more you 'time travel', the taller you become.
No offense, but that woudn't make any sense. I think you're confusing high-speed travel with zero-G environments; after orbiting earth in space, it's not the 17,000 miles per hour you were travelling at that makes you taller but instead the absence of gravity's effect on your body. In supersonics jets and take-offs in rockets, the only force to stretch you is acceleration, and even then, you only stretch if you're hanging; conversely, your body would be compressed if you were seated.

On the subject of time travel, I believe that you can only move forward in time; backwards tme travel doesn't even make sense in the laws of the universe. The closest you can get to traveling back in time is slowing down your time frame relative to another person's perspective. (You can effectively achieve this by increasing your velocity and approaching the speed of light. [Meeting or surpassing the speed of light is impossible.]) After being in a slower frame of time for a period, you would emerge back into "regular" time and consequently exist sooner than you would have originally. (i.e. You would be 25 years old when you should be 30.)

And that is all chronofreak has to say at the moment; I can't really think right now, I've other things to do..

[Methos]

You can't even travel AT lightspeed, let alone faster than it. Time does slow down as you approach lightspeed though. It has to do with the fact that the hypotoneus of a triangle is a longer distance than the vertical side. As you move forward, light takes longer to travel (cuz it no longer goes straight up and down, but at a diagonal).

Anyway, faster than light travel isn't possible cuz it's all relative. When you're moving at lightspeed, to you the world is moving at lightspeed and you're sitting still. But if you were to look off to the side, you'd see stationary light waves, cuz they're moving exactly as fast as you are. I hope that makes sense.

That's why lightspeed is the "universal speed limit." If you hit lightspeed-to you, everything around would be going lightspeed, except light which would be going as fast as you-stationary.

Man, post Newtonian physics are awesome!

...oh yeah that "wormhole" thing isn't gonna happen either. As someone said, the tidal forces of a black hole rip you apart as you cross the event horizon and approach the singularity. Even if this wasn't the case, nothing escapes a black hole. If you got in a black hole, you couldn't exit the black hole at other end. You'd need a "white hole" as an exit point, which throws everything out. Those don't exist. If somehow they did, the best wormhole you could get would be one-way only.

[CDink]

Travelling back in time is a paradox.

Say, if you travelled back to September 11th 2001, and stopped the terrorist attack from happening - this day today, you wouldn't have travelled back in time to stop it, because according to the history, the attack would've been evaded and there would be no need to prevent it. Or if you travelled back and prevented yourself from being born, you would've never grown up and hence never get the opportunity to travel back and prevent aforementioned action.

Travelling forth is a bit more tricky, especially because we don't know how many dimensions exactly that time exist in. All we really have is a bunch of logical assumptions.


right the grandfather paradox making time travel to the past impossible.


MIT had a "time travelers convention" anyone hear about that? Yeah no one came.

I don't think time travel can happen. Time is so delicate one bend can change EVERYTHING..it's be far to dangerous. Ask Ray Bradbury.

[Panzer]

WAIT

scientists now think that if you go back in kill your grand father but it now sets up an alternate universe.

our world is just one of TRILLIONS of alternate universe

[Vegetas pink shirt]

Ugh I hate your use of "scientists" as if because one person who claims to be one is representitive of the whole academic community. Care to share where you found this out?

Or is this a bungled version of many worlds theory?